1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a job management apparatus, a job management method, and a medium that has recorded therein, readable by a computer, a job management program which manage jobs being executed and to be executed, on the basis of licenses.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a known conventional technique which makes jobs of an application program be executable based on licenses. In case of thus executing a job on the basis of a license, the number of available (buyable) licenses is finite generally. Jobs which require a particular kind of license may concentrate at a time, and may cause a shortage in number of licenses, which makes the jobs inexecutable.
If a job is inputted while a shortage in number of licenses occurs, the job waits for execution (i.e., the job is set in a queue). This job is not executed before a necessary number of licenses become vacant after other jobs previously put in the queue are completed.
To avoid this kind of problem, various techniques concerning management of jobs executed on the bases of licenses have been disclosed (for example, Jpn. Pat. Appln. Laid-Open Publications No. 2003-256064, No. 2003-58266, No. 2001-249819, and No. 5-346851.
However, in the conventional techniques described above, the numbers of licenses are fixedly assigned to prioritized jobs and normal jobs, to such a low extent that normal jobs, which are frequently executed, hardly influence prioritized jobs. For example, in this case of fixedly assigning the numbers of licenses as described above, there has been a waste. That is, even when any slot for a job to be assigned to a normal job remains unused, this slot cannot be used for execution of a prioritized job.
If a contract of increasing the number of licenses is made, it is possible to eliminate the problem that a job to be prioritized cannot be executed. This is not preferable in view of costs.
From the above situation, in conventional job management as described above, a manager manually arranges priority ranks of plural jobs to be executed simultaneously, in order that jobs to be executed with priority should avoid waiting for completion of other jobs which are not so highly prioritized. This manual management requires skills and man hour, and places a burden on the manager.